I am an avid student of all kinds of things relating to the paranormal, I have been following such subjects since I was maybe 7 years old.
Some recent posts you may think that I am just drawing on Christian influences, but actually, I read the Qur'an twice while I was locked up for a year, I was heavily reading Peter Carroll's Chaos Magic, and New Falcon books in general, including stuff from Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson, I read many texts about Zen and Taoism, a little of Zoroastrianism, and became aware of a religion which I now firmly believe is the grand-daddy of Christianity, Tengrism.
A key rule that you pick up especially when you read R.A.W. is to not confuse the text with the living Spirit. Most Christians get this wrong, most religious people in general, in fact. Many religions have absurd prohibitions towards even studying these other areas. And yes, I studied Anton Lavey and Order of Nine Angles stuff as well. Of course, I did not go far into any of these things, certainly never joined any Coven or Order, I have always been a lone wolf and I think Chuang Tzu would say nice things about me refusing to carve my Pu into something and not let it grow wild and wibbly wobbly as it wants to.
So, this is gonna seem very out of left field, but last night I let myself be dragged into being the barfly-buddy of a sad and sweet greek man who is staying in the pod hostel I am staying in, and in the bar a couple doors up from the Gagarin House hostel, I was introduced to the following beer in the best form, being a tap (most of the beach bars only have Heineken, which I really don't like that much):
There is something strange and peculiar about this drink. Occasionally I drink something that does strange and helpful things to me afterwards, but this one absolutely owned the whole field.
It has the most delightful bouquet, it is very rare you can honestly say that an industrially produced beer is actually a good drink. The hops used in it are like nothing I have ever tasted, and I am, yes, a fan of czech beer, especially the smaller breweries, as well as aged Trappist beers, but this one is on a whole nother level by itself above all.
Not only does it smell and taste like what a beer really should, it also has an odd effect on me.
I had 2L of beer last night, and normally that would leave me pretty ragged in the morning.
Instead, this morning I woke after about 6 hours of sleep, with an incredible amount of mental energy, I did let myself sleep, and I didn't really take care to hydrate as well as I probably should have.
Despite this, all day I have felt almost like the time that I ate a Komplet Lepinja, a special eggy bready thing they make in south-east-central Serbia, the town where my Montenegrin friend (@annarchi, a user you can find in the Steem chain posting about architecture).
Probably it won't do it quite the same way to me again, but it is now at the top of my list of beers to drink when I am out with friends. Actually, that might be again tonight with the co-working space I am now working from, they were going somewhere tonight if I remember correctly, something to do with a group that came here on Sunday and did some video production and roped everyone they could into doing some acting.
Anyway, so, this rambles quite a way all around the landscape, as usual.
But the point is that even though it is generally bad to drink, in this case, it was one of the best things I has ever passed my lips from start to finish.
The most important thing is this:
I have been struggling with a sense of despair and isolation. I mentioned in probably more than a few previous posts, and my poor friends and colleagues have been getting more than a bit of my whiney tone.
Both during and after the effects of this most singular type of lager beer, have seemingly broken a great deal of my despondence.
I also figured out and tried something today, which has been working spectacularly well at keeping me alert and working, which is, to not have lunch. I had a huge breakfast, and when I got the midday hungy, I instead decided to go get a cup of hot chocolate from one of the numerous robot cafe machines that are very popular in Bulgaria.
I am part way through cleaning up and customising the best Steem RPC access library I could find, written in Go, of course, for Go apps, and though there is very little in the way of error handling, as it's just a simple wrapper to make calling RPCs as neat as a local function call, I decided that I should integrate my own logging library and adopt it throughout the Rosetta API middleware I am building.
This then led me to also a related series of libraries that I wrote to build dynamic, multicast cluster coordination gossip communication systems that I wrote for Parallelcoin. It took quite some time to detach both the logger, and the little collection of useful libraries (the logger has the ability to push out logs over UDP in a stream to other servers).
It has been a while since I did this kind of elementary shuffling/cutting/joining of code like this, and it was a bit of a grind for a while and eventually I got it done, which is what prompted me to write this article.
But the centre of this story is how this silly drinking excursion I went on last night and the beer that I drank, seem to have broken a rut I am in. Only in a small way, so far as I can tell, but enough that maybe I will start rolling along a bit faster.
I will of course likely report further if this special beer does or does not repeat in its effects. Very likely, not. Very likely, this was just the cloak under which the Lord pushed me gently out of the rut after so much praying in these last few days.
We have a big job in front of us, in more ways and in more things than just this cryptocurrency, there is things going on in the world that are bubbling up to the surface with the avid efforts of many many disconnected individuals who are trying to see through the fog of disinformation and expose the individuals whose influence, and those of their ancestors, were responsible for so much of the misery of human history, especially the 20th century.
I am weak and small, and I can only do so many things and I will diverge and tend towards all sorts of things that are probably not helpful at times, but I do my best to allow the Spirit to express through me, and for that I often discover that I don't have to put myself in boxes as much as I thought, though sometimes I need a lot of training to break a bad trajectory.
Life is getting better, and I think that the world is changing for the better. Or at least, those who are in this world who wish to live in a better one.
Never let the world blow out your flame. We need every last one of you.